


Things Hidden and Misunderstood

by thebibliophile_rises



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: BAMF Gaila (Star Trek: Alternate Original Series), BAMF James T. Kirk, BAMF Nyota Uhura, BAMF Winona Kirk, Bechdel Test Pass, F/F, F/M, Feminist Themes, Gaila is not just a sex toy ABRAMS, Genderswap, Jamie Minerva Kirk has lesbian aunties, Multi, Women Being Awesome, james t kirk is a girl and therefore is thrice as awesome, space lesbians, specifically Vulcan lesbians who fall in love with humans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-16 02:16:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19308604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebibliophile_rises/pseuds/thebibliophile_rises
Summary: George Kirk isn't the only hero on the USS Kelvin. After all, it's Winona Kirk who picks up their daughter in one hand and the battered remnants of his crew in the other, and she's the one who brings them safely home.





	Things Hidden and Misunderstood

**Author's Note:**

> Star Trek is not my property. All recognizable characters in this fic are the property of whoever owns Star Trek right now-- I'm just playing with them a bit. 
> 
> On a less serious note, I must be a masochist or something, because why did I choose to start this fic here? I don't know. I made myself cry twice while writing this first chapter even *before* I watched the film version of the scene to refresh my memory of it. 
> 
> This is intended to be a multi-chaptered fic (just fyi) and I would greatly appreciate y'all pointing out any grammar/syntax errors. Finally, reviews, kudos, and constructive criticism are always appreciated. 
> 
> Live long and prosper, my fellow Trekkies. 
> 
> (And yes, the title for this first chapter is the title of the third song from the 2009 movie. Sue me, it's one of my favorites. Actually, don't. Please. I need my money for college.)

She felt the contraction hit and it _hurt_ , hurt too badly to think, let alone breathe, but that was what they were telling her to do as they maneuvered her wheelchair along the shaking corridors of the Kelvin--

And then George’s voice was coming from her communicator. She could barely hear him over the grinding shrieks of the ship’s failing infrastructure, but he was _there_ , and she almost sobbed in relief.

“George,” she gasped. “ _George_.”

“It’s gonna be okay,” he said.  “It’s gonna be okay, sweetheart, but you need to get to the shuttle, okay? You just need to get to the shuttle--”

The connection broke just as another contraction hit. When it came back on, she was still screaming. Faintly, she could hear him yelling at the medical personnel to _get her some anaesthesia, goddammit_ \--

“George,” she said as the contraction subsided, “George, they can’t, the first dose wore off and we don’t have any more, it’s alright, I’m going to be fine, we’re almost there--”

She bit her lip to stifle another scream.

One of the nurses glanced at the vitals chart on the wheelchair’s side and cursed. “That baby’s not waiting,” she yelled over the shuddering boom indicative of yet another system failure. “We need to get her to the shuttle _now._ ”

Flashes of pain burst into iridescent fireworks behind her clenched-shut eyes as the contraction reached a crescendo, and she couldn’t keep herself from screaming anymore. George’s voice faded into a static hum of love and worry and fear, her world narrowed to the pain she was feeling, and then--

 _Her diploma (she_ **_toiled_ ** _for this little piece of paper--M.A with highest honors in xenoanthropology, B.A.  in xenolinguistics--and it’s so, so small) is clutched tightly in her hand and her head is spinning to the beat of the joyous din generated by the cheering crowd. She can see her mothers-- they’re crying, their faces alight with happiness--and there’s George, standing right beside them, grinning like a loon, decked out in his full ensign’s dress uniform and carrying an oversized sign that reads_ **_MY GIRLFRIEND IS AN INTELLECTUAL BADASS_ ** _, and good God she loves him--_

 _She completes Starfleet’s School of Diplomacy while he’s stationed on the USS Crazy Horse patrolling the border of the Neutral Zone, and somehow--later, when she asks, he’ll only ever say that he called in a few favors and that some pseudo-bribery involving some very nice Romulan ale may have occurred-- he makes it to her graduation. He’s holding the same sign that he had three years ago at her university graduation, a little faded and creased but still legible, and that night, when he asks her if he can change the “girlfriend” on the sign to “wife,” she says_ _yes without hesitation--_

_He’s speaking almost before the comlink is even open. His cheeks are flushed and his hair is disheveled; she can tell that he ran all the way to his quarters from wherever he was._

_“George, I can’t hear you,” she says, half-laughing. “You’re talking too fast, say it again--”_

_And when he does she straight out shrieks, garnering her some_ **_very_ ** _judgemental looks from a pair of passing Vulcans, but she doesn’t care, because George made Lieutenant Commander and she’s_ **_so proud_ ** _of him--_

“Shuttle Celsius to USS Kelvin, we’re launching,” someone yelled-- the orderly?-- but that had to be wrong, George wasn’t here yet and they couldn’t be leaving without George--

“George,” she gasped. “Where’s George--”

Someone jabbed a hypospray into her neck and she cried out, though it was more from surprise than pain.

“I need you to push,” the nurse said briskly.  “It will hurt a little less in a minute, I promise, but I need you to push _now_ \--”

 

* * *

 

 

Their baby was born five minutes and twenty-seven seconds later, and had the most beautiful blue eyes Winona had ever seen.

“Where’s George?” she demanded raggedly. “Where’s my husband, please, tell me, get him on the comm, _please_ \--”

The crackle of a static hum she hadn’t even registered vanished, and George’s voice rang through the shuttle.

“--sweetheart, I’m sorry, I love you--”

“George?” She asked. “George, what’s going on, where are you--”

“Winona,” he said, his voice breaking, “I’m here, sweetheart, I love you, I’m so sorry I’m not going to be there but no one’s going to make it if I don’t buy them some time--”

“She’s beautiful,” Winona said, because if George wasn’t going to be there to do their daughter’s hair-- badly-- and sneak her into the captain’s chair when no one was looking and teach her how to play chess and watch her go on her first date, then he needed to know that, at least. “George, our baby is so, so beautiful--”

“Our baby?” he said, his voice catching. “She’s here?”

Their baby cried out, and George made a small, awed noise.

“Of course she’s beautiful,” he said, his voice thick with tears. “She’s got you for a momma, doesn’t she? She’s gonna get all your smarts too, and maybe she’ll like chess if I’m lucky-- and, oh God, you’re going to have to beat them off with a stick when she gets big. Winona, I swear, she’s not allowed to date anyone until she’s forty-five--” Winona was already crying, tears streaming down her cheeks like waterfalls, but somehow she managed to laugh at that, just a little.

“Tell me about her,” he said hoarsely. “Tell me about our baby, sweetheart.”

“She’s got the tiniest little toes,” she said, smiling through her tears, “and these wispy little blonde hairs on her head, and the prettiest blue eyes I’ve ever seen, and God, George,” she said, her voice breaking, “I love her so much--”

In the background, a countdown started. Thirty. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight.

“What are we going to call her?” George asked urgently.

“I was thinking Jamie, for your mother--” she said.

“I like it,” he yelled over the ever-increasing amount of noise.

“And Terpsichore for a middle name,” she said, trying for humor, “you know, after your grandmother--”

He made a noise somewhere between a snort and a scoff. “God, no, that’s the worst-- how about Minerva, that’s still mythological without being ponderous--”

“I like it,” she said. “Jamie Minerva Kirk. Our daughter.”

The countdown reached ten. Nine. Eight.

“Tell her that I love her,” he said, desperately raising his voice over a resurgence of critical failure alerts and the cacophony of splintering metal. “Make sure she knows that I love her so goddamn much, sweetheart, tell her every day--”

She was sobbing, now. “I will,” she said. “I will, George, I love you--”

The connection crackled. Faded out for the barest of milliseconds, and then back in.

“--love you,” he yelled urgently. “I love you so much, both of you--”

Then silence.

Everyone stood frozen; the orderly was staring down at the communications board as if he could force the connection back into existence by will alone; the nurse looked bewildered. The doctor was shaking.

Winona simply felt numb, as if the _snickt_ of the terminating comm connection had poured a wall of ice over the burgeoning swell of her grief.

Something beeped, and Winona turned, igonoring the pain in her abdomen because if that was about her daughter she had to do something about it--but it wasn’t. A button on the comms panel was flashing brightly.

The orderly cleared his throat. “Ma’am,” he said hesitantly, “we just received a databurst.”

For a moment she sat there, silent, his words a meaningless static hum, a background to the staccato beat of her heart and her baby’s heart and the emptiness beside them where George should have been-- but then she forced herself to think, and spoke. “A databurst? From the _Kelvin_?”

He nodded. “A recording of the Romulan captain’s demand for Captain Brodan. Sensor readings from the battle and…” he hesitated. “From the inside of the Romulan ship. There’s near-complete external schematics and significant internal ones, ma’am--”

“Encrypt it,” she said immediately. “Encrypt it and pull it onto a secure datastick and erase the traces of the intel from the shuttle’s system. I never want to know that it was on this ship before it made its way to Fleet Intelligence.”

Jamie made a soft, curious sound, and the smile that Winona gave her before dropping a featherlight kiss on the top of her downy head was only a little watery.

“Doctor Rand’ai,” she said, raising her eyes and squaring her shoulders. She was distantly proud that her voice didn’t waver, though it was hoarse. “Will I severely injure myself if I get out of this bed and put on something resembling a uniform?”

Her words seemed to startle him. “No, of course not, but you’ve just given birth, ma’am, so I certainly wouldn’t advise anything strenuous, and a few days of rest would certainly be advisable--”

“As of right now, Doctor,” she said, fighting the lump which threatened to climb up her throat, “I am the _Kelvin_ ’s ranking officer. It is my responsibility to do what I can to rally what remains of its crew and inform Starfleet of what has occurred. I cannot afford to indulge in bedrest.”

He nodded, still clearly shaken. She looked at the nurse. “Lieutenant, is there any spare clothing onboard this shuttle?”

She nodded. “There should be. Let me check.”

“Ensign Ryan,” Winona called towards the front of the shuttle. “What’s the status on the Romulan ship?”

“Gone, ma’am,” he said, his face pale but his voice steady. “They disappeared. And they’re not just cloaked, either-- our visual sensors would have caught the transition, and there’s a trace radiation signature leading out of the sector that seems to have been produced by some kind of propulsion system.”

“Record the sensor readings and the vector data for the radiation signature and add them to the packet we received from the _Kelvin_ ,” she said after a moment. “Starfleet Intelligence will want to see them.”

Her voice was a little unsteady, and she knew it-- but what was left of George’s body was with that Romulan ship, and for a fleeting second she had indulged the notion that no body meant no proof of death. That there was a chance, however miniscule, that he could still be alive.

She knew better.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Ensign,” she said, “I need you to open an encrypted channel to the escape pods and shuttlecraft.”

He tapped several buttons on the communications console. “Channel’s open, ma’am.”

She straightened.

“Officers and crew of the U.S.S Kelvin,” she began. “My name is Envoy First Class Winona Kirk, and I am the ranking officer of this crew.

“We have endured an attack by what can only be presumed to be a rogue Romulan faction. They attacked us without provocation, without warning, and without mercy.”

“We survived,” she continued, “by the grace of our fallen crewmembers’ sacrifices and devotion to duty.

“The aggressor has gone, but there is no guarantee that they will not return. Your safety, therefore, is paramount. Escape pods are being directed towards the nearest Federation outpost as I speak--” she cut a glance towards the orderly, and he nodded before tapping in the coordinates “-- authorization delta-delta-phi-seven Kirk. Any shuttles remaining should initiate a comlink with the medical shuttle _Celsius_ and set course to rendezvous at my location.”

She took a deep breath. “I cannot speak for Captain Brodan, but George--” her voice faltered, “but I know that Commander Kirk was beyond proud to serve with all of you.” She breathed out. “As am I.”

“Kirk out.”

“Ma’am,” the nurse said after a moment, “I found some clothes for you.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant Roh.” She turned to the doctor, about to ask him to hold Jamie while she got dressed, but he was still visibly shaken.

She turned to the orderly instead. “Ensign Ryan, I need you to hold Jamie while I get dressed.” Her eyes sharpened. “I’ll court-martial your ass from here to the end of the galaxy if you so much as _breathe_ on her wrong, you understand?”

He seemed a little nervous, but nodded gamely, stood, and held out his arms; she kissed Jamie on the forehead again, and handed her to him. He held her with a steadiness clearly born of experience, humming a little, and the tight knot of worry in her chest loosened somewhat.

The clothes in which Lieutenant Roh dressed her were soft and loose, but still much closer to Starfleet regulation than the hospital gown she had been wearing. When her sweat-damp hair had been scraped back into something resembling a bun, she began to make her way, slowly and painfully, towards the front of the shuttle.

She sat in one of the pilots’ chairs, hissing a little at the impact, and turned to the orderly, who was holding Jamie securely in one arm and tapping out commands with the other. “How many shuttles have hailed us so far?”

“Only four, ma’am, but they’ve got the others linked in with them. Should I open a channel?”

“Do so.”

The viewscreen lit up, and, after a moment, divided into quarters.

“Ensign,” she said, nodding towards the bottom-right panel. “Lieutenants. Lieutenant-Commander. How many personnel made it off the ship?”

“Six hundred and seventy-three escape pods launched from the ship intact, Captain,” an unfamiliar Andorian woman in the top-left section of the viewscreen said promptly. “Five hundred and twenty-seven survived to reach a safe distance from the battle. Beyond that, seventeen shuttlecraft--seven medical, ten standard, carrying three hundred and nineteen personnel-- managed to launch from the _Kelvin_ before it was destroyed. Thirteen crew have since died, and there are fifty-two crewmembers confirmed critically injured, twenty-three of whom are not on medical shuttles.”

“I want all critically injured and medical personnel transferred to medical shuttles _now_ ,” Winona ordered. “Anyone on a medical shuttle who isn’t critically injured or a doctor is to be transferred to a non-medical shuttle ASAP. Coordinate through Doctor Rand’ai-- he’s the ranking medical officer.”

“This is all well and good, _Captain_ ,” the human man in the bottom left panel said sarcastically, “but maybe we should focus on getting our crew to a proper medbay so they can _stop dying_ , rather than wasting time transferring dozens of crewmembers between shuttles. The nearest Federation outpost is only ten minutes away at maximum warp--”

“You forget yourself, Lieutenant,” she said coldly. “I am the Kelvin’s highest-ranking surviving officer. If you cannot bring yourself to address me with respect, you may feel _free_ to resign your post.”

He fell silent, clearly embarrassed.

“The outpost,” Winona continued, “would have been ten minutes away at the _Kelvin_ ’s maximum warp. We are on _shuttlecraft_ , which have a maximum velocity of _warp one_ . At that speed, it will be seven hours _minimum_ before we reach the outpost.”

“This means,” she continued, narrowing her eyes, “that unless we take the time to reorganize the manifests so that medical personnel and injured crew are actually on the same shuttles, none of them will _survive_ long enough to make it to a ‘proper medbay’.”

She looked at the four officers on her screen. “I want these transfers started in the next five minutes,” she said grimly. “You may have been an insubordinate ass about it, Lieutenant, but you’re not wrong. We don’t have any time to waste.”

 

* * *

 

That unfamiliar Andorian lieutenant was a godsend named Kytar, and Winona was absolutely going to recommend her for a promotion if they all survived the next few days.

“Status report, Lieutenant,” she said, stepping down off the transporter pad of the shuttle _Excelsior_ , which had been designated their makeshift base of operations simply by virtue of having sustained no damage to either its communications systems or its long-range sensor arrays.

“You were the final transfer, Captain,” Kytar replied. “All of the injured crewmembers and medical personnel have been transferred to medical shuttles. Seventeen of the twenty-three critically injured personnel have been temporarily stabilized, and we have sustained no further casualties in the meantime.”

“Good.” Winona said. “Status on Operation Get Help?”

“We still haven’t been able to contact Outpost 73, Captain,” a human woman wearing an earpiece replied from helm-- Ensign O’Connell, she recalled. “The scientists think that those ion storms we passed on the way out this morning are preventing our signal from getting through, but the _Saratoga_ should reach direct hailing range of the outpost in four hours and fifty minutes, provided the patch Ensign Hunter applied to their aft warp nacelle continues to hold.”

“Fine. Does anyone have two-way long-range transmission capabilities?”

“Not yet, Captain,” Kytar said. “Three of the surviving engineers are in the process of modifying the _Excelsior_ ’s communications array, though, and they predict that we’ll be able to boost a two-way transmission directly to Starfleet Command on Earth once they’re done, so long as the _Sarek_ remains within close enough physical proximity that we can use it as a second-order amplifier. The connection will be tenuous, but it will get through.”

“How long until the modifications are complete?” Winona asked.

“No more than ten minutes, Captain!” someone yelled faintly from under the deck. “We’ve just got to rewire a couple more junctions and reprogram one of the power converters and we’re all set!”

“Good,” she said. “In the meantime-- Lieutenant Kytar, what’s the status on the crew in the escape pods?”

Kytar gestured towards a dark-haired woman standing at a datascreen. “T’Vala and her team have been in charge of coordinating the relief efforts for the escape pods. We've took as many of the most severely injured crewmembers onto the medical shuttles as possible, but we've hit capacity." She bit her lip. "We'd hoped to avoid it, but we had to start remotely activating the stasis mechanisms on the escape pods of injured crew.”

Winona nodded. “And no one has responded to our distress signal?”

“No, Captain,” she responded, then bit her lip. Her antennae twitched nervously. “Ma’am,” she began, “I just can’t help but notice, but, last time I saw you, you were, um,” she gestured formlessly, “with child, and now… you’re not.” she finished lamely. “Are you alright?”

Winona froze for a moment, incredulous. Was she _alright_? Her husband was not yet two hours dead, over a third of her crew had been murdered, and her ragged fleet of survivors-- including the unarmed medical shuttle on which her newborn daughter was being kept--was navigating its way through the charred wreckage of one of the finest ships in Starfleet en route to a skeleton Federation outpost that was, nonetheless, their best hope at survival. No. She was not alright.

But her crew didn’t need to--couldn’t-- know that, because she was their Captain, and the burden of their hope and their resolve in the face of calamity fell on her shoulders.

“None of us are fine, Lieutenant,” she said. "But I suppose that I am better than I could be."

Out of the corner of her eye, Winona saw that nearly everyone on the shuttle had turned a surreptitious ear to her conversation with Kytar. Some had expressions of sympathy, others of curiosity, and some of hope. Well. She could give the crew something to celebrate, today; something to remember that was not the death of their friends and crewmates _\-- George_ \-- and the destruction of their ship.

“I went into labor about three hours before the Romulan vessel attacked the _Kelvin_ ,” she said. “I gave birth on the medical shuttle _Celsius_ about forty minutes ago. Her name is Jamie,” she continued among a surge of whispers and exclamations of glee, smiling a little, involuntarily, at the sound of her daughter's name. “She is healthy, beautiful, and very loud, and she is on the _Celsius_ , since it is the only medical shuttle to have neonatology scanners.”

She waited for the wave of congratulations to die down, and then she turned back to Kytar. “Now,” she said, “what’s the status on the repairs to the _Rosalind Franklin_ _’_ s impulse engines?”

 

* * *

 

Upon hearing that her new Captain had _given birth_ not an hour ago and was standing, _what_ , Ensign O’Connell turned to T’Vara, her eyes wide with shock.

“She gave _birth_ an hour ago and she’s _standing_?” she whispered. “Wow. Just… wow.”

T’Vara frowned slightly as she initiated a diagnostic on the secondary short-range communications relay. Of course, for T’Vara, _frowning slightly_ meant that only the tiniest of furrows in her brow marred her normally neutral expression, but at this point, Ensign O”Connell prided herself on being rather good at interpreting Vulcan micro-expressions.

“Is this uncommon among human women?” T’Vara asked eventually. “Among Vulcans, recovery from birth is near-instantaneous--”

“Among humans,” and older woman holding a tricorder interrupted drily as she walked by, “childbirth and its aftermath are colloquially known as _hell_.”

“Oh,” T’Vara said-- slightly nonplussed, as shown by the slight widening of her eyes and the tiniest lift of one eyebrow. “Then I suppose,” she said, “that the Captain must be a woman of exceptional fortitude and determination.”

"She is," Ensign O'Connell agreed. They worked in silence, for a moment-- T'Vara overseeing check-ins with crew stuck in escape pods and, occasionally, remotely putting them in stasis, and Ensign O'Connell maintaining course and speed so that the _Excelsior_ kept pace with the swarm of escape pods that surrounded it.

Suddenly, T'Vara spoke. "Aoife," she said, and Ensign O'Connell glanced at her, startled, for T'Vara rarely called her by her given name.

"Yeah?"

"We could have died today."

Ensign O'Connell-- _Aoife--_ breathed in carefully, focusing very hard on keeping her fingers from trembling. "I know that," she said levelly, "but I really can't afford to dwell on it right now, T'Vara, or I'm going to break down, and I really _can't_ \--"

But then a warm hand lay itself over her tense ones, hesitantly, and Aoife looked up, shocked, and saw that yes, it was T'Vara's hand that was on hers, and that T'Vara was _looking_ at her, and that there was something in her eyes that made Aoife want to blush and look away. She didn't.

"I... am not reading your thoughts," T'Vara said. "It is important that you are aware of this. I would never do such a thing without your explicit consent."

"I know," Aoife said, heart racing, everything that she knew about what skin-to-skin contact meant to touch-telepaths like Vulcans running through her mind. She cracked a small, wobbly smile. "Stealing a kiss, T'Vara?"

A faint green tinge appeared on the line of T'Vara's high cheekbones. "I know that this is not truly the time or the place for such overtures, and if they are unwelcome I will of course desist--"

Aoife shook her head, and turned her hand over so that her hand and T'Vara's lay palm to palm. "No," she said, amazed that she could keep her voice so steady. "They are not unwelcome."

T'Vara let out an audible breath. "I was separated from you for one hour, forty-three minutes and fifty-two seconds during the evacuation of the _Kelvin_. That is... unacceptably long, considering our mutual ignorance as to each other's safety."

She remained silent for a moment, and then spoke. "When we first met, I was new to Earth, and you took me to a great many places that had personal significance to you, and we became friends. I would like for you to come with me to Vulcan so that I can show you my home as my _t'hy'la--_ my beloved and my truest friend. And then I would like to go back to Earth, and to see again the places close to your heart."

"This is not... a _sudden_ wish," she continued. "It is one that I have held close to my heart for months. I... I was afraid to voice it, but when I saw you again on the transporter pad of the _Excelsior,_ I realized that it was illogical to refrain from explaining my feelings for fear of rejection, as there is a zero probability of a relationship forming without clear intentions being stated by one or more of the parties involved."

Aoife frowned. "T'Vara," she said, "the reason you were afraid I would reject you--"

"Was entirely illogical and based in my personal insecurities," T'Vara said firmly. "You did nothing to make me think that you no longer cared for me or that you thought Human-Vulcan relationships or relationships between women are improper. I was simply unsure whether you _could_ potentially care for me romantically, and that was accompanied by other, baseless worries."

Aoife raised the hand that wasn't under T'Vara's and placed it on top. "Now it's a hand sandwich," she said solemnly.

T'Vara's lip twitched in amusement.

"And that trip to Vulcan? It's a date."

 


End file.
